Technology

As I write this, massive fires are erupting all over California, and massive protests are erupting all over the world. Is the former a facet of the climate crisis? Is the latter a symptom of hyperpolarization caused by hyperconnectivity? Yes, I mean no, I mean itimpossible to say. Thatwhat it means to live in a stochastic age.

This is an era of stochastic terrorism: &The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random.& It is also an era of climate crisis as a stochastic disaster, causing a whole spectrum of ‘random& natural disasters to become ever more probable and terrible.

Is ours also an era of stochastic political strife? Does the worldincreased connectivity, aided by social mediainherent amplification of outrage, have second-, third-, or fourth-order effects which heat rhetoric and protest, triggering secession movements and massive rejection of the status quo? Is our hyperconnectivity the political equivalent of global warming?

If so, it would explain a lot. The baffling and horrifying rise of neo-Nazis and white supremacy around the world. The increasing political polarization of seemingly every polity. The growing dearth of anything like a political middle ground. The huge protests scattered across the globe, against almost every form of government.

But letnot be too quick to diagnose this. This might be somehow periodic: terrorism and protests were both more common (per capita) in the late 60s and early 70s than they are today. It might just be a symptom of, and backlash against, a global trend of neoliberalism-morphing-towards-antidemocratic-oligarchy, which, sadly, is the recent economic / political history of much of the world.

The hypothesis is that this stochastic strife has something to do with technology and hyperconnectivity, that across the world we&re experiencing the political equivalent of global warming. Intriguing, but far from proven. How might we test or measure it?

The obvious test is to introduce a control group, A/B across a representative slice of the planet — but that seems pretty unlikely, and I&m not aware of any reliable quantitative measures of political strife, and either way it suffers from the inevitable problem that itimpossible to tease out just one of the myriad factors which accumulate (or not) into political fury and protest.

— At least itimpossible at any given moment. But we do know that connectivity is likely to just keep increasing, especially across the developing world, and that averaged across nations it is likely to change faster than almost any other factor at play.

So if this hypothesis is correct, we ain&t seen nothin& yet. Political outrage, massive protests, and secession movements will continue to grow worldwide, eventually at a pace which makes California wildfires seem leisurely.

Lethope that either the hypothesis is proved wrong, or that we find a new way, transcending traditional nation-states, to distribute political power … before all those eruptions turn into conflagrations.

Welcome back to TechCrunchChina roundup, a digest of the latest events that happened at major Chinese tech companies and what they mean to tech founders and executives around the world.

Alibabanemesis

Alibabanew rival is shaking up Chinainternet landscape.

This week, four-year-old e-commerce upstart Pinduoduo displaced JD.com to be the fourth-most valuable internet company in the country. Its market capitalization of $47.6 billion on Friday put it just behind e-commerce leader Alibaba, social networking behemoth Tencent and food delivery titan Meituan in China. Baidu, the search equivalent of Google in China, has fallen off the top-three club, ending a decade of unshakable dominance of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (the &BAT&) on the Chinese internet.

The story of Pinduoduo comes down to growing internet penetration and the rise of social commerce. Pinduoduo, which is known for selling ultra-cheap products, is particularly popular with price-sensitive residents in small towns and rural regions, a market relatively underserved by online retail pioneers Alibaba and JD.com . However, Pinduoduo has set about targeting more urban consumers by heavily subsidizing big-ticket items such as iPhones.

Its seamless integration with WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging app owned by Pinduoduo investor Tencent, contributes to adaptability among a less tech-savvy population. WeChat users can access Pinduoduo via the messengerbuilt-in lite app, skipping app downloads; they also get deals from group-buying, thus the name Pinduoduo, which means &shop more together& in Chinese.

Earlier this month, Pinduoduo founder and chief executive Colin Huang, a 39-year-old former Google engineer of few words, gave a 45-minute speech at the companyanniversary, according to a summary published by local tech media Late News. He announced that Pinduoduo has surpassed JD.com in gross merchandise volume, or the total dollar value of goods sold. Itunclear whether the companies use the same set of metrics for GMV, for instance, whether the figure includes refunded items.

While its rivalry with JD.com is nuanced as both companies are backed by Tencent, Pinduoduocompetition against Alibaba is more blatant. In his missive to staff, Huang acknowledged that Pinduoduo is &standing on a giantshoulders,& hinting at Alibabasheer size. When it comes to fighting the impending battle during the upcoming SingleDay shopping festival (11/11), the founder sounded poised. &Pinduoduo should not feel pressured. The one who should is our peer.&

Also worth your attention

• 82% of Chinese adults used digital payments in 2018, up about 5%; among those living in rural China, 72% made transactions via online banking, telephone banking, the point-of-sale system, ATM or other digital channels, said a new report released by the PeopleBank of China. Beijingpush for rural areas to go cash-free is in part what gives rise to such flourishing e-commerce businesses as Pinduoduo.
• Few things move the bitcoin market like President Xi Jinpingendorsement of blockchain. Speaking at a politburo meeting on Thursday, Xi called for China to &take blockchain as an important breakthrough to achieve independence of core technologies& (in Chinese). Bitcoin price soared more than 10% in response. But as industry experts cautioned, when China, where crypto exchanges are banned, speaks of &blockchain& it usually means the encrypted technology that not only undergirds cryptocurrencies but can revolutionize a whole range of sectors like finance, manufacturing and agriculture. Expect all corners of Chinese society to capitalize on the blockchain concept with even greater force.

• One of Chinamost prominent venture investors just closed $352 million for the first fund of his new financial vehicle. JP Gan, a former managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners, recently started Ince Capital Partnerswith internet veteran and venture investor Steven Hu. Having backed noted companies including Xiaomi, Meituan, Ctrip, Musical.ly, to name just a few, Gan will continue to fund early to growth-stage startups in Chinainternet, consumer and artificial intelligence sectors.
• Smartphone maker Xiaomi hired leading voice recognition expert Daniel Povey. The researcher who was part of the team to develop the widely used open-source speech recognition toolkit Kaldi announced his next move on Twitter. Before this, Povey declined an offer from Facebook after he was fired by John Hopkins University for attempting to break up a student sit-in. He told The Baltimore Sun earlier that he intended to join a Chinese company because &they don&t have American-style social justice warriors& and he would feel &more relaxed among the Chinese.& Many Chinese tech companies have research and development operations in the U.S. including Xiaomi, which set up a U.S. R-D center in 2017 (in Chinese) to deepen collaboration with chipmaking giant Qualcomm.
• NetEasee-learning unit Youdao began trading at $13.50 per ADS in the U.S. on Friday amid increased regulatory scrutiny on Chinese IPOs. Youdao, which operates a suite of popular online educational products from dictionaries to MOOC-style courses, had over 100 million monthly active users by the first half of 2019, shows its prospectus. Itone of the many attempts by NetEase founder Ding Lei, once Chinarichest man back in 2003, to add momentum to his 22-year-old company. These days NetEase makes the bulk of its revenue from video games and ranks only behind Tencent in Chinabooming gaming sector. In September, it sold its once-hopeful cross-border e-commerce business Kaola to Alibaba for $2 billion.

Weave, a developer of patient communications software focused on the dental and optometry market, was the first Utah-headquartered company to graduate from Y Combinator in 2014. Now, itpoised to enter a small but growing class startups in the ‘Silicon Slopes& to garner ‘unicorn& status.

The business announced a $70 million Series D last week at a valuation of $970 million. Tiger Global Management led the round, with participation from existing backers Catalyst Investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital, Pelion Venture Partners and LeadEdge Capital.

The company was founded in 2011 and fully bootstrapped until enrolling in the Silicon Valley accelerator program five years ago. Since then, itraised a total of $156 million in private funding, tripling its valuation with the latest infusion of capital.

&Our aim with this funding round is to exceed our customers& expectations at every touchpoint, investing heavily in the products we create, the markets we serve and the overall customer experience we provide,& Weave co-founder and chief executive officer Brandon Rodman said in a statement. &We will continue to invest in our customers, our products and our people to build a solid, sustainable, and scalable business.&

Weave charges its customers, small and medium-sized businesses, upwards of $500 per month for access to its Voice Over IP-based unified communications service. Rodman previously launched a scheduling service for dentists and realized the opportunity to integrate texting, phone service, fax and reviews to facilitate the patient-provider relationship.

While his second effort, Weave, has long been targeting the dentistry and optometry market, Rodman told Venture Beat last year the opportunities for the company are endless: &Ultimately, if a business needs to communicate with their customer, we see that as a possible future customer of Weave.&

Based in Lehi, Weave added 250 employees this year with total headcount now reaching 550. The company claims to have doubled its revenue in 2018, too. While we don&t have any real insight into its financials, given the interest itgarnered amongst Bay Area investors, we&re guessings itposting some pretty attractive numbers.

&Weave has some of the best retention numbers we&ve ever seen for an SMB SaaS company,& Catalyst partner Tyler Newton said in a statement. &We&re continually impressed by their accelerated growth and results.&